It is almost impossible to walk into a Parisian bar and not partake in spirits—just as it is impossible to resist the city’s pull from the heights of the Eiffel Tower. Both leave the traveler lightheaded. Some, like Erika LaBrie, take that intoxication a step further: she "married" the tower and even took its name. I haven't gone that far, but I do feel unsteady as I look down at the city. The tower is more than a nineteenth-century engineering marvel; over time, it has fused with the spirit of the Ville Lumière until the two became nearly synonymous.
It is difficult to reconcile its permanence with the fact that it was once destined for the scrapyard. Gustave Eiffel held only a twenty-year concession; the tower was scheduled for dismantling in 1909. What saved it, somewhat ironically, was a blend of Eiffel’s fierce devotion and the sudden utility of war.
Eiffel repositioned the tower as a laboratory for progress, supporting the radio experiments of Gustave Ferrié. By 1903, the structure had become a functioning wireless station. When the Great War broke out, its height became an incomparable vantage point for intercepting German communications. Those invisible signals, snagged from the sky, secured the tower’s strategic necessity—and its survival.
The signals have long since faded into the Parisian sky, but their consequence remains etched in the iron below. I was touching that iron when I noticed her—a dark-haired woman standing a few feet away, gazing wistfully into the distance. The sun caught her profile, outlining her features in light. She was the ghost of a photograph I had seen the day before—the dancer, the courtesan, the enigma: Margaretha Zelle.
The name she adopted during her rise as an exotic dancer—Mata Hari—means “Eye of the Day” in Malay: the sun. It was this persona, and her proximity to military officers and politicians, that drew the attention of intelligence services as the war spread.
By then, Zelle was in her early forties. The novelty of her “oriental” performances—which today might be recognized as striptease—was fading, and her finances were precarious. Both the German Abteilung III b and the French Deuxième Bureau had approached her; the British watched them all. She gave little of value to any of them, and in time, all three found her expendable.
In late December of 1916, her fate was sealed by a few lines of Morse code intercepted by the tower’s receivers. The message, sent by Major Arnold Kalle of Abteilung III b, referred to an “Agent H-21.” Curiously, it was transmitted in a code the Germans knew the French had already broken—a Judas kiss carried on radio waves. That message furnished the pretext for her arrest and a closed-door trial.
The role of “secret agent” served the tower well, but it doomed Mata Hari. Despite a lack of direct evidence, Zelle was convicted of espionage—scapegoated for the deaths of thousands of French soldiers. None of the powerful men she had known came to her rescue. The tower had Eiffel; Mata Hari had no one.
Even her lover, Vadim Maslov—a Russian captain twenty years her junior, for whom she had fallen deeply—refused to testify in her defense. His betrayal likely wounded her more deeply than the firing squad ever could.
At dawn in the autumn of 1917, she was led to the outskirts of Paris to face twelve soldiers of the 4th Zouave Regiment. She did not cry or plead. She refused the blindfold, looking directly at her executioners. Before the command was given, she blew a final kiss into the wind.
The Iron Lady remained. Agent H-21 did not.
The reverie broke. The woman who had stirred this haunting was gone, as if the air itself had reclaimed her. I looked out over Paris—I was leaving in two days. A sudden heaviness settled over me, tinged with something like guilt, as though in some distant past I had been one of the twelve who raised a rifle and waited for the command.
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— Vibe & Verse